More stuff, a mixture of following along on Internet tutorials in addition to trying stuff out on my own. In particular, since a lot of my stuff so far have been very lacking in surface detail I’ve been trying to learn to do that. First is by faking it with normal maps and then by actually trying to model the detail. I haven’t been entirely successful but it’s been fun learning. The amount of work that goes into modelling decorative elements and I found it amusing that I had to look up reference materials for antique furniture and construction for the designs.

One of the things I’ve tried making is a larger scene set in a corridor with a vaulted ceiling but that proved too difficult. There are just so many parts that go into it and I had a hard time understanding the architecture. So I salvaged what I could from it for a more modest scene. I suppose I might try to create a real vaulted ceiling again later. I am pretty happy with how this shield turned out as it features some of the modelled detail work I was talking about.

I also spent a bit of time on more of the Blender Guru videos. This meadow scene looks great but it just uses Andrew Price’s assets so it’s not original in any way. It is, again, very humbling how something relatively simple like this can drive a system to its knees and we need all kinds of cheats to make it bearable.

Finally, I’ve also branched out and started watching videos by CG Cookie as well who is also very good. In particular his tutorials on dynamic paintings are very cool, enabling animations like the above. Of course it hasn’t escaped my notice that this also looks so good because it uses textures that are so high in quality.

Anyway I haven’t been spending as much time on Blender as I probably should due to being engrossed in Dark Souls 3 this month. Hopefully I’ll get more done once I’ve finished with the game.